Oscar
Moderator
Reforming Command Without Weakening It - Part 1
Command, Culture, and the Path Pakistan Has Not Yet Tried
Pakistan does not need a weaker Army. That is a statement which will get both positive and many negative responses considering the history of Pakistan, various point of views on institutional overreach. But what it does need is an Army that is stronger at the work an Army is meant to do: defending the country, adapting under pressure, giving honest professional advice, learning from mistakes, and then carrying out the elected government’s lawful direction with discipline.
It also needs an Army willing to fix the very civilian weaknesses that keep pulling it into governance roles it has repeatedly said it does not want to permanently hold, by more often than not stepping out of the way of those within civilian population who are actively trying to do so.
That last part matters more than critics of the military usually admit. Pakistan's senior military leadership has, across successive chiefs, expressed frustration with civilian dysfunction and stated a preference for strong, competent, accountable civilian government rather than permanent military stewardship. This is repeated also by the current leadership - then why do we have the current political situation with accusations of manipulated elections and an illegitimate hybrid regime?
A Quick Overview:
Academic literature on Pakistan's civil-military relations largely rejects the idea that military dominance is simply the product of ambitious generals seizing power against a healthy civilian order. Various academics have argued that a chronological analysis of civil-military relations from 1947 to date show a imbalance that is sustained by "historical legacies, institutional weaknesses, and geopolitical dynamics". Which fine for anther 100 articles or books but the crux is that the military's persistence is not just about what the Army wants BUT it is about what civilian institutions have failed to become.
Army Formation Commanders Express Support For Leadership Upholding Constitution And Rule Of Law
This has led to where previously the military occasionally intervened to today where military authority over political and security domains has become structurally embedded, regardless of which civilian government holds office. This distinction matters for the reform argument: if tutelage is now institutionalized rather than contingent, it means the pattern will not dissolve simply because a well-intentioned chief wants it to. Structural incentives outlast individual intention.
Part of this is because the military instrumentalizes political power to "maximize its interests as an independent actor," not because of some inevitable cultural or structural determinism. Let's take this in simpler English - the Army doesn't take power because it "has to" BUT it takes power because doing so benefits it institutionally or even economically, and it calculates that benefit like any self-interested actor would. However that put's the blame unfairly on one party without acknowledging that Pakistani political culture has even during its inception been fragmented, personality-driven parties unable to build consensus, feeding cycles of instability that create openings for intervention.
A footnote on some ground realities:
Political Realities:
Pakistan's political parties did not develop as ideological or policy driven organizations competing for votes on program and performance. They developed as patronage networks built around families, land, and local power brokers, inherited from a colonial administrative structure that never fully dissolved. Research on party institutionalization in Pakistan describes this pattern precisely: personalization of leadership, patronage-based mobilization, elite dominance over party structures, and weak internal democracy that ran sporadically alongside recurring military interventions that repeatedly interrupted whatever institutional maturity parties might have built.
This brings up recent events that must be discussed precisely to justify the arguments made later in the article: PTI is instructive precisely because it looked, for a moment, like an exception to this cycle but then collapsed back into it. Khan's rise was genuinely different from the traditional dynastic pattern: it drew on urban middleclass frustration, anti-corruption messaging, and a personality driven movement that explicitly rejected the "family business" model of PPP and PML-N. That was real disruption of the old patronage logic, at least in branding and initial mobilization.
But disruption of the old parties' form was never matched by disruption of the underlying mechanism.
Read that again - PTI did not build durable internal party institutions, transparent candidate selection, or policy infrastructure independent of its leader. It replaced dynastic personalization with charismatic personalization. When Imran Khan needed electables to win seats in 2018, PTI absorbed the same local power brokers, landowning notables, and patronage tied politicians it had once criticized in other parties simply because those networks remained the only functioning currency of electoral mobilization in much of Pakistan. The party did not dismantle the patronage system; it borrowed it.
A movement built around one charismatic figure, however sincere its anti-establishment rhetoric, reproduces the same vulnerability as a dynastic party in that it simply substitutes a cult of personality for a cult of family
Where Criticism of the Army goes too far:
Treating "the Army" as monolithic across this span flattens six decades of distinct institutional leadership into a caricature that is rhetorically convenient but historically inaccurate. Today's officer corps is working in different threats, different international patrons, different economic constraints with no personal connection to decisions made two to three generations earlier. You can tirade against Zia-ul-Haq actively encouraging the rise of dynastic and patronage-based political families as a deliberate strategy but that has little actual
More importantly, this is strategically counterproductive to any ask for reform, because it gives any current leadership no incentive to behave differently if it will be judged identically regardless of its choices.
However, a reform argument that acknowledges genuine change across decades, real attempts at restraint, and real strategic pressure invites the possibility that current leadership can be a reform partner rather than merely a reform target.
That is the spirit in which the rest of this article is written.
What Reform actually looks like:
If the goal is genuine partnership rather than confrontation, reform cannot be a single speech or a single reshuffled command chart. It has to start where every institution's culture actually starts: at intake, and run consistently through to the promotion board. And it has to be built in a way that does not read as an accusation against any individual currently serving because the pattern being described is structural, not personal.
The most useful operating concept here is not a Western import to be adopted wholesale, but a principle already familiar to any professional soldier: centralized intent, decentralized judgment, disciplined execution which is often called mission command. Senior leadership sets the objective, the legal boundaries, and the non-negotiable limits. Subordinate commanders are trusted to adapt method to ground reality without waiting for every detail to be approved upward.
This is not indiscipline. It is what already happens, out of necessity, in remote counterterrorism postings and disaster response, where officers cannot realistically seek approval for every decision. The reform is to make that culture permanent and rewarded, rather than tolerated only when circumstances force it.
It would be inaccurate and disrespectful to the officers who built it - to suggest Pakistan's promotion system is primitive or without merit. Selection boards for Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel already review service records, staff and command experience, professional courses at institutions like Command and Staff College Quetta and the National Defence University, and Annual Confidential Report performance, with identity concealment used up to Brigadier rank specifically to reduce personal bias. That is a genuinely defensible mechanism, arguably more transparent than equivalent processes in much of Pakistan's civilian bureaucracy. The scaffolding for merit-based, criteria-driven evaluation already exists.
This is important because it means the reform being proposed here is not a demand to build an entirely new bureaucratic apparatus from nothing. It is a request to add specific new evaluation categories into an already-functioning board process — a far more realistic and far less disruptive ask than critics on either side of this debate usually assume.
Where there is strain and how to scaffold it:
Both through written accounts by retired veterans and sporadic articles show that even well designed selection processes are not immune to informal pressure. Officers have publicly alleged that Central Selection Board outcomes were influenced by unverified intelligence based assessments, and a court has ruled that officers cannot be denied promotion on the basis of such assessments without being informed of the specific allegations and given a genuine opportunity to respond. This example is not specific to the Army, but it illustrates a pattern that any honest reform proposal has to reckon with directly: a selection process that looks objective on paper can still be shaped by informal signaling that never appears in any written record.
Intake and selection should test explicitly for the ability to distinguish disagreement from disrespect, the capacity to revise a judgment after new evidence, and decision-making under incomplete information, alongside the physical and character standards already in place. This does not mean selecting for rebellion. It means selecting officers confident enough that a question does not register as an insult. However, this is where the previous paragraph's aspect has a direct implication for anything resembling a "candour" or "openness" evaluation criterion. If poorly designed, such a criterion could be quietly turned into the opposite of its intent. Historically there are recorded pretexts Where an officer who was simply doing his job by raising a hard question, is penalized by dressed up reports as a judgment about his "attitude" or "reliability." That risk is real, and any credible version of this reform has to build in the same kind of procedural safeguard the courts have already required elsewhere: clear written criteria, disclosure of specific concerns, and a genuine right to respond before any evaluation affects a career. Without that safeguard, a red-team or structured-dissent mechanism becomes theater at best, and a new tool for retaliation at worst. It has to be protected by design, not by good intentions alone. To be clear, this is NOT A PAKISTANI ARMY SPECIFIC ISSUE and faces militaries everywhere.
There is good news..
Training Infrastructure Is More Ready Than Skeptics Assume:
There is documented institutional appetite for exactly this kind of shift and it does not need to be imported as an external idea.
Existing curriculum-development discussions among Pakistani defence planners already identify gaps around low-intensity conflict, decentralized operations, and preparing junior leaders for complex, non-linear environments. In other words, the institution's own internal planning literature has already flagged that junior officers need more structured practice in autonomous decision-making - not less. This suggests that a mission-command and structured-critique curriculum addition would be building on a gap the institution has already identified for itself, rather than imposing an unfamiliar external standard
Pakistan's officer corps also has real, if uneven, exposure to allied mission-command doctrine through international training exchanges but that exposure is currently contingent on external political relationships rather than a stable internal pipeline, but it demonstrates that the institution can absorb and apply this kind of training when the opportunity exists. The task is to make that capability internally generated and consistent, rather than dependent on the state of a particular bilateral relationship in a given year.
A Honest reality check:
This is where the proposal has to be most careful, because overpromising here would undermine its own credibility. Pakistan's Army is one of the largest standing forces in the world, and officer intake at PMA Kakul happens at genuine scale. Selecting for traits like tolerance of ambiguity or the capacity to revise judgment under new evidence requires trained assessors and validated tools. Unfortunately, due to lack of resources Pakistan does not currently have widely documented, specialized psychometric infrastructure for these specific traits at mass-intake scale. Publicly described selection criteria emphasize physical fitness, academic performance, and background and security vetting rather than structured cognitive-flexibility assessment.
Recognizing this constraint changes the sequencing of the proposal, and makes it considerably more realistic. Rather than attempting to retrofit new psychometric assessment into mass officer-cadet intake immediately which would inevitability strain assessor capacity and risk becoming a superficial checklist — the more defensible starting point is to pilot these evaluation additions at Command and Staff College and National Defence University level first, where cohorts are smaller, assessors are more experienced, and there is already documented appetite for curriculum review. Only after these criteria are tested, refined, and validated at that scale should consideration be given to adapting a simplified version for earlier-career selection and, eventually, cadet intake itself.
What This Would Mean in Practice
Put together, a credible and properly sequenced version of this reform would involve:
- Adding candour, mentoring quality, and command-climate outcomes as formal evaluation categories within the existing Selection Board process for Lieutenant Colonel and above which is not a parallel or new bureaucratic structure.
- Building explicit procedural safeguards into any new "openness" criteria, modeled on existing legal precedent requiring disclosure and a right to respond, so the mechanism cannot be repurposed as an informal loyalty test in either direction.
- Piloting structured-dissent and red-team training first at Command and Staff College and National Defence University level, where the institution has already identified curriculum gaps and where smaller cohorts make careful evaluation possible.
- Treating any change to PMA-level intake as a longer-term, second-phase objective, contingent on validated assessment tools developed through the senior/mid-career pilot instead of an immediate mass rollout.
- Maintaining full discipline, chain of command, and legal authority throughout: none of this proposes any reduction in command authority, only an addition to how professional judgment is trained, evaluated, and rewarded once lawful decisions are made.
Why This Serves the Institution's Own Stated Goals
None of this asks any serving officer, at any rank, to compromise loyalty, discipline, or professional judgment about operational security. It asks the institution, deliberately and over a generation, to build the internal habits that would make its own repeatedly stated preference : a strong, competent, self-sustaining civilian government. This makes it genuinely achievable rather than a phrase repeated across successive tenures without structural follow-through.An officer corps trained from selection onward to distinguish a valid question from a challenge to authority is also an officer corps less reflexively inclined to treat civilian oversight itself as a threat to institutional competence. That shift does not happen through a single policy announcement, and it will not happen if today's leadership is treated as merely the next chapter in an unbroken, unchanging story rather than as a potential partner working under real constraints inherited from decisions made long before their own service began.
Pakistan's civilian institutions carry an equal, and in many respects larger, share of the work still required such as rebuilding parties around policy and internal democracy rather than personality or family, professionalizing a bureaucracy that has been politicized for generations, and building parliamentary and judicial capacity strong enough to make constitutional boundaries something more than a phrase in a speech. That work is not the Army's to do alone, and no honest version of this argument suggests otherwise.
But if the institution's own leadership, across successive tenures, has genuinely wanted a Pakistan where strong civilian government does not require a permanent guarantor — this is what building toward that outcome would actually require: not less discipline, but discipline extended further into the habits of learning, honest reporting, and institutional self-correction that any professional force ultimately depends on to remain effective over the long term.
End of Part 1
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